Most elegant men's dress shoe ever! With Pictures and POLLING!

[Kushcoma9000]

These wholecut stingrays of cdmoore and winot are interesting:

Wow that looks amazing, especially this image

But I won't deny that the stingray skin makes it look flashy lol

 

[well-kept]

I'm with you...I'm the least flashy person on the planet but I prefer wholecuts and seamless wholecuts above all. I like the simplicity. I like the lack of pretension.

I suspect the real problem is that the simplicity and elegance embodied in a wholecut seems "simple"...easy to duplicate...when in fact, it may be the hardest thing to do...esp. to do well...in shoemaking. In any field.

And point of fact, again...FWIW, it is no harder to maintain a spit-shine on a pair of wholecuts than on a pair of captoe brogues. It is the toe puff that prevents creasing in the extreme forepart of the shoe, not the toe cap.

The toe cap, like other components of a pieced shoe works to "de-focus" our attention. Re-direct our eyes. The way a silver gum wrapper will divert the attention of a magpie. The same thing could be said for the perfs on a toe cap or even that self-same mirror shine. At some point we lose all sense of the shoe--of the "gestalt" of the shoe, we're so busy tracing the baroque, even florid, ornamentation that has virtually no meaningful function.

Mind, I've nothing against any of that but call it for what it is.

I agree with all of DWF's observations, and especially appreciate the added notion of lack of pretense. Elegance and simplicity - of form, of expression, of thought - are often arrived at after long and arduous study, aspiration and labor. To express a complex and meaningful idea in few words is rightly regarded as an achievement. In the visual arts, Picasso and Matisse drawings are a point of departure. And before I violate my own point... enough.